Experimental Analysis of the effect of column feed pipe configurations on the flow morphology

Droplets entrained by the vapor phase can drastically reduce the separation capacity of distillation columns and cause severe corrosion problems, process instabilities as well as higher emissions due to droplet carry-over into the downstream process units.
Intensive interactions between vapor and liquid phases favor droplet formation. Feed pipe and feed inlet are prone positions for such droplet formation, depending on flow rates, phase change and pipe geometry resulting in characteristic morphologies.
Several models are available to predict the flow regime for known liquid and vapor flow rates. However, these models and flow maps are often restricted to fully developed flows in straight pipes of small diameter only and do not account for the effects of various entrance lengths, larger diameters as well as bends found in industry. Thus, an experimental analysis is performed to study the effect of column feed pipe configurations on the evolving flow regime using the wire-mesh sensor technique (Fig. 1). Wire-mesh sensors visualize the dynamic flow structure in the pipe cross-section at high spatiotemporal resolution (1 to 3 mm, up to 10,000 Hz). This work is supported by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) based on a decision by the German Bundestag (FKZ 03ET1395D).